WASHINGTON—Food makers processed more peanuts over the past year than nearly any other time on record despite a national salmonella outbreak blamed for killing nine people and scaring consumers away from peanut products for months.
Peanut farmers who once feared $1 billion in losses are chalking up their good fortune to a bad economy that has more people reaching for peanut butter as a cheap lunch.
Agriculture Department numbers back up the theory. Peanuts processed for snacks—items such as sandwich crackers that were heavily recalled during the outbreak—were slightly down for the accounting year ending July 31. But peanuts used for peanut butter set an all-time record at 1.1 billion pounds, topping the previous year's total by 100 million pounds.
That was enough to make the year's overall peanut production the third-highest in history, missing the top mark set in 2005 by just a fraction of 1 percent, with nearly 2 billion pounds being processed.
Read the full story by Bob Evans (AP) at Google News.